Description:Describes a visit to the Morses and Lotty Kidder at Fordham.

Transcription:

185

We encounter Lotty [Kidder].

of the hall when [Arthur] Mason came in, a gun in his hand, with which he had been trying to punish the aggressions of neighbor’s chickens. I spoke to him, when we passed upstairs as without recognition, and I remembered, then, my putting him into my boarding-house book as “a little, low Englishman” or something of the sort. He has recently returned from a two or three months visit to the old country, which has considerably mollified his Americophobia. “It rained every day there.” With his wife, he removes to New York soon. I fancy the cub made a good mercantile investment in marrying honest Jane Gibson, she is forewoman or something of the sort in a millinery establishment and earns thrice or twice as much as he does. He looked broad, squat and sturdy. We supped with Mr & Mrs M. [Moses and Rebecca Morse] and the children, then, ascertaining at Lotty’s house the way the party had taken, walked thither, to Spuytendevil Creek, where we encountered Lotty, Brentnall, Hill and some three or four others, mostly female. Lotty shook hands and immediately began to tax [George] Boweryem about Kinne’s comments on her card (which had been retailed to Hill by Phillips) doing indignant respectability on the subject. Presently she said Kinne had to be thrashed, to be knocked down — that she’d under-